Moving

Going to Paris on Monday, but here we are moving too, to an apartment downtown, so I am packing my books into boxes, which will be moved in my absence, and I am wondering how I will find everything again and how long it will take to sort my life out into physically manageable proportions when I come back: ie, the dish towels in the kitchen, the poetry books--where will I keep the poetry books and how long will it take to find them all again? There are bookshelves in the new place, built in, so will I leave my little black Ikea bookshelf here? Here is furnished, there we will need furniture.

Disorder distresses me. I fear that if I let a little disorder sneak in, soon I will be submerged in disorder. Papers will go missing. Just the thought of it makes my pulse speed up, my breath grow fast and shallow. Quickly I get up and jot a note on a post-it. I wake up covered with post-its. 

Untidiness is the flip side of  tidiness, as procrastination is the shadow of punctuality. Marianne Moore, I have always thought, judging by her poetry, must have been a person obsessively neat. Obsessive, period. Elizabeth Bishop perhaps not quite so much. I am not going to draw any conclusions from this.